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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#571

Post by AnimalMuppet »

I grew up in the 1970s. I remember my dad having to regularly lube the joints of his truck, crawling under it with a grease gun to reach the Zerk fittings. I remember vehicles needing a tuneup every 3000 miles, and reaching 100,000 was an achievement.

Cars today? First tuneup at 100,000 miles.

You can say that cars are a lot more fragile today - get in a crash and they fall apart. That's true, but it's deliberate, and it's not deliberate so that they can make them cheap. It's deliberate so that fewer people die.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#572

Post by DangitBobby »

evan_ wrote: post #438
bo1024 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your parents, lower middle class in the 80s, could afford a washing machine that lasts 40 years. You, lower middle class in the 2020s, can afford with the same resources a washing machine that lasts 5 years and is no more effective than your parents' (but has an app). In the sense of the parent comment, you are fortunate that the magic of capitalism currently produces such cheap washing machines that even people as p…

It lasted 40 years because when it broke they called the repairman. Now when stuff breaks people just buy a new one and complain that it doesn’t last as long.

The repairman charges $150 labor and offers to fix it by replacing a single part that costs half the purchase price of the machine. Seems likely you'd be better off buying the new machine.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#573

Post by pachorizons »

WalterBright wrote: post #557
nicoburns wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "socialism" you mean the majority of economic activity being state-run, then probably not. If by "socialism" you mean things like worker-owned corporations, strong anti-competition laws, high levels of consumer regulation, then absolutely.

If worker-owned collectives produce superior products, why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.

Because they were violently suppressed by the interests of the capital class over multiple generations.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#574

Post by MostlyStable »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #326
ants_everywhere wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as a significant decline. The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate. This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it…

You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article: > ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer. For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization bel…

I read that portion not as arguing that every possible metric is completely subjective, such that some people will actively prefer, for example, a version that doesn't last as long, or costs more for no additional benefit, but rather that quality has a lot of different axes, some of which are mutually exclusive or in active tension, and the relative weighting of different axes is purely subjective. There is no way that one can argue that it is "correct" to value durability over cost. Or aesthetic appeal over simplicity.

Basically, when there are many axes of quality, the pareto frontier gets very large and very complex and no one position on it is inherently better than another, even if everyone universally agrees which direction is "better" on every individual axis.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#575

Post by gtowey »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #502
nehal3m wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a great insight. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the problems I regularly experience as a consumer of goods is that it is very difficult for me to judge quality, meaning I can explicitly not intuit value. For example, two years ago I bought 3 identical pairs of Levi’s jeans at considerable cost. Granted, they’re all I wear, but given that I follow the washing instructions and don’t put undue…

lol jeans. Just got into selvedge denim, go buy from a company like brave star denim, and don’t buy anything less than 15 oz. I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it’ll be made in America of Japanese materials. Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes. They don’t do research and they make extremely suboptimal purchases by trusting big bran…

It's not just being stupid, it's that the information space is overflowing with marketing and BS. It's a mammoth task to parse through it all and not be suckered in by a slick advertisement that says the product you're looking at has everything you want. Amazon is absolutely the worst for false advertising, garbage masquerading as top of the line. And the usual alternative, using Google to search for companies directly, has turned into a largely futile experience as their search results are absolutely terrible, showing almost only the "top" retailers which are the same purveyors of cheap crap.

I have spent a considerable amount of time researching better, more durable pants and this is the first time I've heard about this company. So thank you for that!

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#576

Post by ants_everywhere »

walleeee wrote: post #558
ants_everywhere wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The labor theory of value This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than something Marx contributed. > Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it? You're right that this is an apparent contradiction. Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when he wa…

I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large (morality it is easier to see the argument) but I admit it has been years since my reading. I agree with you that there is a strand in Western thought which is infatuated with science/engineering to a historically novel degree but I am not so sure that enlightenment ideals fit so neatly in the same…

> I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large

The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.

His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle class society. His own point of view isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans create the objective world and truth through interacting with it.

To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read it and you may get a different take away from it.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#577

Post by everdrive »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #522
Der_Einzige wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you learn about clothes and fashion, it’s quite easy to tell the difference. HN is full of computer nerds who can’t fanthom that computers are as mysterious to normies as sneakers are to the nerds of HN. A lot of people know how to tell apart good and bad footwear - it just isn’t you or your crowd!

Shoe culture places very little emphasis on the actual quality of the product. Brand and exclusivity is far more important.

"Shoe culture" might be one the dumbest trends in the market today.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#578

Post by trial3 »

bsenftner wrote: post #243
trial3 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly! i came to this thread to smugly type “capitalism” in a comment. but i’d like to, less smugily, posit that it’s really just enshittification. MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification. It’s cheaper to use cheaper glues. To slightly change the fabric blend towards polyester. Thinner gauge wiring. There are tradeoffs towards more complex devices being made, sure, but that’s not exactly what “quality” is, to me…

I think the "MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification" is a simplification and a cop-out because this is not just MBA-driven. This is across the board in all of society, and I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis, and as a result when they choose an enshittificating decision, they do not realize it. They are not connecting the ra…

> a simplification and a cop-out

a simplification and a cop-out of what? blake, i am writing a hn comment and not an academic textbook

> This is across the board in all of society

ok but the article is largely about physical goods, that's what we're talking about

> I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis

lmao i clicked on your bio and just knew i'd see MBA in there. maybe there's something that has happened to institutions that do this teaching. maybe it's because they, too, have mastered business administration

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#579

Post by gtowey »

WalterBright wrote: post #546
Forgeties79 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always viewed it as less a discussion about any sort of real defined “quality metric” and more companies asking “what is the least amount of time, money, and effort we can put in before people stop buying it?” Even more simply put: what is the worst version of the product that people are willing to buy?

Many products come in 3 levels of quality: 1. the stripper, designed for a minimum price that will draw people into the showroom 2. the luxe, which has every feature, designed for the people who don't care about the price 3. the midrange, which is what most people wind up buying This strategy maximizes the profit that can be made. You'll see it from refrigerators to cars.

The problem I see is that main difference between those options is not quality, but features.

For example with refrigerators you see integrated touch screen, viewing windows, and all kinds of esoteric features.

But the core of the product, the compressor and overall cooling system is not actually any better. In fact, looking at reviews shows that those parts are often garbage quality too.

So it fails at the core job of keeping your food cold, and the added features are just more things to fail as well meaning that buying the more expensive products are generally a lose-lose situation.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#580

Post by wwfn »

layer8 wrote: post #305
wwfn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a good take. Market pressure for durability decreases with brand awareness. Though I think the article argues there's little market pressure regardless. I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another household or if the items you still have were all on the hardier end of…

I wouldn’t mind that much if switching to another brand/model would solve the problem. But sometimes I order half a dozen of the most well-reviewed alternatives, and they are all worse in some way in comparison.

I feel that pain!

This comes up for me most often with running shoes. By the time the model shoe I've loved wears out, it'll be out of production and the n+1 iteration re-balanced whatever decisions to make the shoe a worse-for-me fit.

(It's tempting to think the big-sneaker cabal conspires to ensure consumers are perceptually exploring options)

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